Happy Birthday Mommy

Today is not only Cinco De Mayo, it is my mom’s birthday. You would think today would be a happy day full of celebration, but it’s not for me. I haven’t heard my mother’s voice in 6 years. It’s been even longer since I’ve seen her. I’ll never forget the last phone call we ever had. We were having a great conversation and she did her usual thing of asking me why my brothers don’t ever call her and how I should tell them to call her.

Now, my mother is not the greatest person in the world. In fact, she’s pretty unstable. My older brother once told me he remembers her taking pills when we were really young for something. I’m assuming it’s bipolar disorder. Why? The way she talks to us is ridiculous. She hasn’t been a very good mother to us so we sort of drifted away from her when my parents got divorced. She has caused a lot of drama, made scenes, and just been out-right cruel to us since then. She was never very good to me as a child either, but that’s a story for another day.

My mother would say this every time we talked on the phone; “I don’t know why your brothers don’t ever call me, I don’t understand it, you should tell them to call me” and so on and so forth. I understood why my brothers didn’t want to talk to her. She would always start fights and play the victim; you were always in the wrong with her no matter what was going on.

I didn’t want to lose this relationship with my mother by defending my brothers; after all, she would take offense if I defended them and I would lose the mother-daughter relationship that we never had when I was growing up. I didn’t want it to go away because I said something I knew she wouldn’t like. I couldn’t keep my mouth shut this time, though.

I told her that no matter what I said to them, they didn’t want to have relationship with her right now and if they want to, they will contact her.

Yeah she took that way worse than I expected. I said it as nicely as possible but she wasn’t having it. This triggered a 3 hour shouting match. I don’t yell. I don’t like fighting, I don’t like arguing, and I don’t raise my voice very often but she got me to do it during this phone call. She started crying and yelling about how I needed to be on her side because of the one time in my life I needed my mommy and she was ACTUALLY there for me. How she didn’t know how I could defend them after what they did to her and how they are treating her. It was like she hadn’t done anything wrong.

She hung up a few times on me and I called her back twice to try and keep talking to her and calm her down but on the third time I gave up. I didn’t call back and she didn’t call me back. It really hurt and sucked for a while. I tried to call her on her birthday that year but she didn’t answer and then didn’t call me on my birthday 3 months later. She holds a grudge for a long time unless someone’s health is down the drain; even then sometimes health issues won’t do it.

She started messaging me and my brothers over Facebook and causing problems. She would start out nice and sweet to try and get us on her side again but when we weren’t falling for it she would automatically get hostile and defensive and I couldn’t handle it after a while. I blocked her on Facebook, too and so did my brothers. I haven’t had to deal with her crap in almost a year now. Yeah I miss having a mother in my life but I don’t miss her at all. I have so much less stress in my life without her making up reasons to fight with me.

That being said, today is the day that reminds me of what my mom and I had for the 6 months before I decided to finally be loyal to my brothers. I will never regret being loyal to them because even though they haven’t been there for me that much, they have definitely supported me much more than my mother ever has and they deserve my loyalty much more than she does. I just wish I had a mother sometimes. So even though I don’t really want to honor the birth of my mother, I do want to honor the mother-daughter relationship we should have had. So here’s to what we could have, and should have had.